Comparison of bacterial communities in soil samples with and without tomato bacterial wilt caused by Ralstonia...

Ralstonia solanacearum is one of the most notorious soil-borne phytopathogens. It causes a severe wilt disease with deadly effects on many economically important crops. The microbita of disease-suppressive soils are thought that they can contribute to the disease resistance of crop plants, thus, evaluation of the microbial community and their interaction characteristics between suppressive soil (SS) and conducive soil (CS) will help to understand resistance mechanism. To do this, the bacterial community structure, correlation analysis with soil chemical properties, interaction network of SS (nearly no disease in three years), and CS (suffered heavy bacterial wilt disease) were analyzed.

A higher bacterial community diversity index was found in SS, the relative abundance of Nocardioides, Gaiella and norank_f_Anaerolineaceae were significantly more than that of the CS. Moreover, the relative abundance of main genera Bacillus, norank_o_Gaiellales, Roseiflexus, and norank_o_Gemmatimonadaceae were significantly more than that of the CS. Redundancy analysis at the genus level indicated that the available phosphate played a key role in the bacterial community distribution, and its role was negatively correlated with soil pH, organic matter content, alkali-hydrolyzable nitrogen, and available potassium contents. Interaction network analysis further demonstrated that greater diversity at the genus level existed in the SS network and formed a stable network. Additionally, the species of Mycobacterium, Cyanobacteria, and Rhodobiaceae are the key components that sustain the network stability. Seven clusters of orthologous groups exhibited significant differences between SS and CS. Moreover, 55 bacterial strains with distinct antagonistic activities to R. solancearum were isolated and identified from the healthy tomato plant rhizosphere soil of the CS.

Our findings indicate that the bacterial diversity and interaction network differed between the CS and SS samples, providing a good foundation in the study of bacterial wilt.